This approach is what allowed the team to examine the pollen evidence in the context that had been unavailable to Solecki’s team in the late 1950s.

It also allowed for detailed documentation of how the sediment had accumulated around and above the burial — information that contributes to the interpretation of whether the body was placed deliberately rather than deposited by water flow or gravity.

The sediment, in this sense, is as much a part of the evidence as the bones themselves.

It is the medium through which the burial was preserved, and it carries its own record of what happened in the cave over thousands of years.

Reading that record requires specialists who spend careers learning the vocabulary of sediment — geologists, sedimentologists, and a new generation of geoarchaeologists who work at the intersection of earth science and human prehistory.